Obama aid council faces questions

4/15/14 11:57 PM EDT

A foreign aid council President Barack Obama created to recast U.S. assistance programs overseas made its long-delayed public debut this week amid lingering questions about the process it has used to arrive at its proposed reforms.

The Global Development Council met publicly Monday morning at the National Press Club and then retreated to a closed-door, unannounced afternoon session with Obama at the White House.

At the morning session, the council unveiled a seven-page set of policy recommendations, including a development bank, a major conference on development policy and a move toward "Innovation, Transparency and Evidence-Based Policy." Attendees had little idea what to expect before the meeting, since the only substantive description of the panel's work was an agenda entry: "Global Development — Moving Beyond Business as Usual."

Council chairman Mohamed El-Erian and National Security Council senior director Gayle Smith directed the session, with all the council's members joining in, the Brookings Institution's George Ingram said.

"I was pleasantly impressed that all 10 members were engaged in the conversation," he said. "It sounded like different members took charge of the individual parts."

However, Ingram said the panel gave no indication of how the proposed recommendations had been arrived at, or whether they'd been voted on, or about what the council's future plans were. "There was nothing about next steps. ... They didn't say if they were putting together another set of recommendations or if there would be more meetings," he said.

Panel members said they'd held listening sessions to solicit comment from interested parties, but some in the audience said they were concerned that those events were not adequately publicized.

"We're very receptive to these admirable goals, [but] there’s an awful lot about the work of the council that is somewhat of an unknown and would have greatly appreciated, before the report was issued, to be part of the process," Mercy Corps's Andrea Koppel said in an interview, noting that few on the panel seemed to have ground-level experience delivering aid in impoverished countries. "Hopefully, there will still be an opportunity to influence their direction and findings as they go forward."

The process concerns were reinforced late Monday when the White House issued a "readout" indicating that Obama met at the White House with the 10-member council and 11 administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and U.S. Agency for International Development Director Raj Shah.

Despite the high-powered list of attendees, the session did not appear on Obama's public schedule or on public schedules released by Kerry's and Hagel's offices. In addition, the meeting was never announced in the Federal Register, as the Federal Advisory Committee Act usually requires for advisory boards like the council.

Asked about the lack of notice and public access for the meeting with the president, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden insisted the White House had been transparent about the council's activities.

"Fully consistent with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the Global Development Council met on April 14. In the morning, council members held a large public meeting with a diverse range of interested stakeholders to solicit feedback on the council’s initial recommendations on how the United States can have even greater impact on development around the world," Hayden said. "In the afternoon, council members had the opportunity to meet with the president and senior U.S. government officials who sit on the council to share the recommendations they had discussed with the public that morning."

Hayden said there was no effort to keep Obama's meeting with the council under wraps. "Not every meeting is on the president’s schedule in advance. But clearly we weren’t hiding the fact that it happened, since we put out a public readout," she said.

The Obama administration recently lost a court battle to keep secret a policy directive the president signed back in 2010 at the same time he announced plans for the council. In December, a judge rejected the administration's arguments that the unclassified order should be kept secret on grounds of executive privilege. Earlier this year, the White House relented and released the directive.